F-ZERO to F-HERO friday: Controller Biters

Ok we have all had those games that are frustrating. We have all also had our moments in our younger less calm days where we would throw the controller, yell curses to the gods and in the case of my friends creepy little brother, actually scream and bite the controller. We have learned to not destroy our peripherals in furious anger any longer because we realized we have to pay for them and the games are even harder to play with a broken stuck in button. Even though we handle it better we get the stabbies from these points of frustration. heres our list of the top 5 we can remember thoughout our video game careers.

#5
Dale - Power Strike (Sega Master System)



this was a shooter that was fun as hell. You had your choice of 8 weapons that you could upgrade to various levels of power output. There was nothing better than getting 4 of your favorite weapon. Mine was this giant ball that would float infront of ship when you hit the button it would flash and incinerate anything it covered. As you powered it up the circle grew. There was something about this game though. When you died you had to start over with nothing. And IT WAS FUCKING HARD. You had blown through the levels on your first life now you on level 5 and you can't get any fucking weapons except the gay 2's what the hell NOOOOOOOOOOOO.

Mike - Star Fox 64 (Nintendo 64)



Another of my favorite games, one that I consider myself truly good at. There's a regular difficulty and a hard difficulty, I can finish the game on both with relative ease...with one exception. The final level has two versions. The easy version has you flying through a rocky terrain world killing hundreds of little ships, turrets, and other minions. The hard version has you take on your arch-nemesi, the Star Wolf team, in a pitched dogfight amongst some old temple ruins. On regular difficulty I can blow through either with no problem. Hard mode, I can take out the Star Wolf team with ease...but the "easy" level? FREAKING IMPOSSIBLE. There's about three times as many ships and lasers flying around, and within a minute I always find myself 3/4 dead with both wings broken off, Peppy and Falco dead, and Slippy (somehow still alive) wailing and crying. Then one of thirty attack ships kamikazes into me and I smash into four stone ledges and explode in a fiery detonation of misery.


#4
Dale - Every Mega Man Ever Made except that terrible rpg

There is one thing about this series that was true from title to title and that was those fucking boss battles. There was always an order, a chain of command to use the weapons you aquired on the next boss that once you figured it out you got a big ego stroke as you laid the hurt to those personified animal robots. Untill you got the order though and you couldn't beat anything and you felt helpless and stupid. You would franticly pick the levels at random and try to make it through and then only realize there was no way in hell you were going to beat the boss at the end. On the third time you would be like through the fire level or some shit and you would fight the boss almost kill him and then boomf-oomf-oomf explode into a million little energy particles and it was your last life CONTINUE I HAVE TO DO THE WHOLE LEVEL OVER FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK.
There is actually an amazing band that has songs about ninetendo games and here is a fan made video for their awesome song about the megaman bad guy cutsman and their frustration with him.



Mike - Monster Hunter Freedom 1 & 2 (PSP)



One of my favorite games is also one of the most frustrating. In Monster Hunter, you head out into the wilderness armed with impossibly large swords and hammers and fight giant fucking wyverns and monsters. Then you take their claws and scales and use those to make better equipment so you can go kill bigger monsters. That's pretty much the series in a nutshell. The wyvern fights are epic battles - it's all real-time, and you have to do every dodge, ever slash, every roll manually. And they take like half an hour each, or sometimes even a full hour to take one down. It's a great game. However, it has also made me almost hurl my psp against the wall countless times. Sometimes you'll be absolutely destroying a boss, shattering its horns, its claws, even cutting off its tail, and then suddenly it'll roar (staggering you), followed by a bite, claw, tail-stump whip (stunning you), bite, trample, fireball, trample (re-stunning you), claw, claw, bite, claw, aerial Akuma-diagonal-fireball, and you'll be dead. Other times the wyvern will be almost dead, limping away, and you'll be desperately chasing it from map to map, waiting for it to land so you can hit it ONE MORE FUCKING TIME to kill it, and time is rapidly counting down. You'll see it slowly landing in the distance and you'll charge towards it, only for it to touch down AND IMMEDIATELY LEAP INTO THE AIR AGAIN and fly off. And this will happen about 5 times and time will run out and you'll lose and you'll want to just stab the psp with a knife over and over again.


#3
Dale - NHL 94 (Super Nintendo)



If your canadian you know this series very well. The forefront of hockey games since 93 ea sports has given teenage boys and young men something to fight about. The first game (93) had fighting but they removed it the next year citing video game violence or some bull crap like that. The reason 94 was so terrible was it was the year withut fighting before if you won more fights it was ok if you lost the game.
"dude i totally beat you hahaha"
"thats probably because i was tripping all over that guys face from that fight i murdered you in in the second period"
Sitting in my friend Jason's basement listening to purple by stone temple pilots we played this game to death. We would get right into it and sometimes when your winning by the other person would come back force into over time and then your like its ok what are the ods of him scoring 3 in a row i mean i was in the lead. And then you start over time and they score in the first 10 seconds on a coast to coast skate. And you just want to cry and punch kittens in the face because it was just tooooo terrible.

Mike - Crazy Taxi 2 (Dreamcast)



I absolutely love the Crazy Taxi series, and for years it KILLED me that Crazy Taxi 2 was only available on Dreamcast. (It was recently re-released on PSP as well, and I was overjoyed.) When my cousin who had a Dreamcast got the first one, I played it for like 10 hours straight and stayed up all night to finish all the challenges and beat all the high scores. So when he got a pirated disc of Crazy Taxi 2, of course I had to do it again and stayed up all night. After many, many repetitions of "GO!...restart. GO!...restart. GO!............restart" of restarting a mission after like 5 seconds because of a bad turn or slightly crooked stop, I got to the last challenge level. Apparently the disc wasn't burned 100% correctly, because when I started the mission I noticed a small glitch of THE BUILDINGS AND ROADS BEING COMPLETELY INVISIBLE. I could see right through them to see the eternal ocean the city was built on, the people twelve blocks away, and all the other cars on the road. Through painstaking trial and error, I actually beat the level, after probably at least 2 hours of racing through traffic at breakneck speed only to suddenly smash off the invisible building or fence in the way. In some ways this makes the "beat it completely" achievement even better. But in other ways it just made me want to kill myself.


#2
Dale - Halo (Xbox)



The first Halo was not the most intense of the series because it was the first. The first Halo was the hardest because there were two weapons way better than any other the shotgun to fight the flood and the pistol to fight the hunters and without these two weapons the game was hard as fuck. The pistol was wierdly strong and had zoom so you could use it as a quasi sniper rifle and if you shot a hunter in the back in the orange part it would kill them in one shot. With these two weapons the game was handleable it was hard as fuck but you could trudge through it. Now when your playing Co-op if your partner backs up you come back to life go find your body and get your shot gun back. there was no hope without it. It was the golden bastion of life. Sometimes though you would run back to your body and you couldn't find the shotgun. ITS GONE YOUR DEAD SIMPLE AS THAT. This is the freak out you die your pretty tense running with your p shooter trying to get your awesome shotgun and you finally get there and its gone and you grow frantic you can't find it it blew off a cliff from a grenade. Now your being killed over and over by those fucking baby heads.

Mike - World of Warcraft (PC)



This is the only game on my list where the urge to smash something comes from other players and not the game itself. World of Warcraft is a fantastic RPG universe game. It's huge, there's an impossibly large number of quests and monsters to kill, and it's got crazy replay value. Oh yes, and it's also infested with the dregs of society whose apparent purpose in life is to harass and slaughter other players and ruin their enjoyment of the game in some horrible, ridiculous dick-measuring contest.

We started playing on a PVP (player versus player) server, which means that in most areas of the game, fighting other players is enabled. There are two factions, Horde and Alliance, and if you kill a player on the opposing faction who's near your level, you earn Honor, which can be redeemed for gear. So there's a valid reason for PVP fighting, which is fine. Personally I never did it, because it didn't interest me at all. But if someone attacked me I fought back.

The problem I had was when characters decked out in starmetal fiery armor wielding swords bigger than their bodies who were level 70 (maximum level) would just slaughter low level characters for no reason at all. There was absolutely no gain for them - you don't earn honor for killing players who are a lot lower level than you - so the only reason for their behavior is...they're giant douchebags. At first it wasn't that bad. I figured that given WoW's size, it was inevitable to run into the occasional 13-year-old kid dealing with his rampant hormones through the game. But then it kept happening. Repeatedly. Even worse is that when you die, you have to run back to your corpse and resurrect - at which point the fucktard who's been killing you runs out from around a tree and one-shots you again. Why would you do this! Do you really have nothing better to do than just ruin the experience for other people?? It'd be like your boss buying a box of donuts for everyone and everyone going to the lunchroom to get one, only to discover that fucking Steve who doesn't eat sugar got there first and just urinated over the entire box.

Sadly, it's a self-replenishing cycle. Many players, upon hitting level 70, don't celebrate their ascension by going out and attempting a difficult dungeon or doing a quest to get a great new piece of gear. No, these players' thoughts turn immediately to bitter, bitter memories and they head right off for the starter areas to kill rookie players and start the cycle all over again.

However, as annoying as this was, I was amazed to discover that it could still get worse. When you die in WoW while fighting a monster or NPC, your gear loses durability and you have to eventually pay to get it repaired. At high levels, the repair costs are quite high. It's not a huge penalty but it gives players a reason to not be completely careless, since dying does cost them money. Now, when a player kills another player, there is no loss in durability. So I didn't even really care when I got ganked by a bored level 70 idiot, because it was annoying but it wasn't actually costing me anything except some time.

So there I was at a neutral town getting some quests, when suddenly the neutral guards (who to keep towns "safe" will kill anyone who attacks another player nearby) freak out and pound me into mushy bits. I'm shocked, but figure it was just a glitch, and return to my corpse and resurrect. I start talking to the quest giver again and this time spot a gnome rogue, an opposing faction player, pop out of hiding and use some kind of skill or item...which is immediately followed by the guards running over and crushing me once again. Oh but they don't attack the gnome. They just leave him alone, and he runs over and starts laughing and dancing on my dead body. I almost put my fist through the screen. Yes, the gnome's - THIS PLAYER'S - sole objective was not to get any sort of personal reward or experience or anything, but JUST TO GET ME KILLED AND COST ME MONEY. I was stunned. During this moment of pure, utter rage, I realized that shit like this is exactly how those insane stories out of Korea about gamers getting into real-life conflicts happen. THIS would be like fucking Steve not only pissing on all the donuts, but then finding out that he stole your wallet yesterday and gave the boss YOUR MONEY to buy the donuts with.


#1
Dale - Half Life 2 (Xbox 360)



This game is hard but it has that awesome feature where you just come to life at the last check point you passed. There was one enemy in this game that was basically a cheap piece of shit that has no business being in any game ever. Maggot gunships seemingly a nice blend of disgusting and firepower you fight the first one in the light house and its a giant fucking pain in the ass. You need to get rockets and shoot at it...... But it shoots your rockets so you have to luck. I died a thousand times there before i finally did it. Play though the game again and then there is this prison level or whatever where there is two maggot ships. Fine whatever they are hard as fuck you expect it. You come back to life pretty much before them anyway so whatever. But when you are playing this spot in the game for a week straight making no ground you get a little fed up with it. Finally i did one of the ever classic FUCK YOU GAME FUCK YOU SHITTY ASS MOTHERFCKING HARD SHIT YOUR TOO HARD I DON'T CARE I AM NEVER PLAYING YOU EVER AGAIN YOU PIECE OF SHIT. I never played it again I sold it and traded it in.

Mike - Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (Nintendo)



This was just a terrible game in pretty much every aspect. None of the fun of the cartoon, pretty much no distinction between the turtles (except Donatello whose staff let you hit guys through walls and cheat). But terrible games aren't that unusual, especially when we're talking old NES games. But one level in particular stands out vividly. If you ever got to this level, you know what I mean. Hell, you probably already know what I'm about to say. You might even be gritting your teeth or weeping under your desk too.

The underwater level.

Correction. The underwater level with the endless amounts of electric kelp that you have to gingerly swim through or die a horrible electrocution death. And it's not a few of these fucking electric death plants here and there. No you're right in the middle of a FOREST of electric seaweed. Oh right and there's a different type of seaweed that if you get too close, reaches out and strangles you. Did I mention the deadly electrical wires that stretch across the tunnels? Or the rotating deadly spikes that you have to navigate around? Oh and the eight bombs that you have to disarm to stop the Hoover Dam from exploding and flooding New York. Oh yeah and you only have TWO FUCKING MINUTES.

The timer was the last straw. Without that looming over your head, it would just be a terrible level that you had to really take your time and slowly work through. But with the timer...god. You end up desperately trying to get to the next bomb, drifting slightly too high into a FUCKING CLUSTER OF PINK BULLSHIT ELECTRO SEAWEED, and watching your life just vanish with a brain-stabbing BRRRZZ BRRRZZ BRRRZZZZ. You'd desperately switch to a fresh turtle (you could switch at the pause screen) only to watch his health vanish as well.

Soon you're down to only Raphael and the poor guy swims up a screen only to be met with more pink than a fucking My Little Pony Meets Barbie convention. Seriously who designed this shit? I must have missed the part in the storyline where the turtles got captured by the guy from Saw.